


Poison

by HermitLibrary_Archivist



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: F/M, Pre Way Back, Rape/Non-con Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-05-26
Updated: 2008-05-26
Packaged: 2018-04-23 17:10:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4884958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HermitLibrary_Archivist/pseuds/HermitLibrary_Archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>by Zelda</p><p>An assassination fails to proceed according to plan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Poison

**Author's Note:**

> Note from Judith and Aralias, the archivists: This story was originally archived at [Hermit.org Blake's 7 Library](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Hermit_Library), which was closed due to maintenance costs and lack of time. To preserve the archive, we began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in August 2015. We posted announcements about the move and emailed authors as we imported, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this author, please contact us using the e-mail address on [Hermit.org Blake's 7 Library collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/hermitlibrary/profile). 
> 
> This work has been backdated to 26th of May 2008, which is the last date the Hermit.org archive was updated, not the date this fic was written. In some cases, fics can be dated more precisely by searching for the zine they were originally published in on [Fanlore](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Main_Page).
> 
> **Original Author's Notes:**
> 
> Previously published in the 'Space City' mailing list.

Wait until you see him fall, they told me. Then it will be safe for you, they said. Nonsensical instructions, when you think about it. They must have hoped that I wouldn't think about it, would never have the chance; that the purposeful and supposedly satisfying act of watching him fall down dead would distract me, divert my eyes while my hands obediently administered my own death, as practiced to perfection.

Minimize the opportunity to think, to hesitate.

But the result was this: he was still standing as I fell. And my last thought, as I fell, was that I had failed, but that at least it was over.

I had failed completely, and I didn't care, because it was _over_. The last thing I saw was the shine on his boots standing steady as my eyes closed, so wonderfully weighty, and the last sound I heard was the roar of machines. And then the infinite negation of nirvana.

  
I am walking up the main road, dressed in my best, and before the sun rises I'm expected to be dead.

The white glow ahead--a second, better sun--would guide me if it happened that I didn't know the road, if I couldn't walk it blindfolded, backward, and still point out every insignificant landmark as I passed it. Or point to where it once was, anyhow, for of late the machines have made rapid progress in the direction of the village. It used to be that you knew you were halfway to the Compound when the screeching and the grinding could be heard. It was thus all my childhood: a landmark of sorts. Now, though, you can hear the machines from the village, and before you're halfway to the heart of the Compound you're among them. Towering fantastic on both sides. Insinuating themselves into your dreams.

We all dream of the machines. I don't know if any of the other dreams are like mine: I dreamed that I rose to investigate an odd sound in the night, in time to see them turning and walking away from the village, even faster than they came. I woke up weeping, terrified. Now I dream I am walking up the main road, dressed to die, bathed in the glow of a second--better--sun.

  
The first sound I hear is a high steady tone in my ears. The first thing I see is the white light-panel, doubled and unfocused, burning in a dull white ceiling.

My first thought is that it isn't over. That I was wrong. And before the first emotion, which I know must be relief and the desire to survive at any price, I move my hand, prepared to poison myself by the backup method, which was just as well-rehearsed as the rest of the plan. (The syringe, slammed hard into the flesh of his upper arm, should have seen him cold dead on the ground at my feet even as I administered the last sufficient drop to myself.)

But my right hand is held fast, and so is my left. Each bound, by a broad band of unyielding substance, tightly to a smooth cold metal bar.

Stiff-necked, I turn my head to the side. The bed is narrow, and painfully white, and has adjustable railings on either side, let down now. My wrists, at hip level, are fastened to the top rung of either of these. By what means exactly I can't see beneath the sheet, rough and white, drawn up over my bare shoulders. It chafes my nipples, hard in the cold that pervades the room. The part of the room I can see to my right is white, all white.

Kick off the covers, and assess what is holding your wrists, for what good it will do. I would, but my ankles, I'm not terribly surprised to discover, are similarly restrained. The best I could hope to do is pinch cloth between my toes and slowly inch it down, but given my nudity and the chill, and increasing clarity of thought, it really doesn't seem worth the effort. Stare at the ceiling. Take a deep breath. Turn to the left. Assess. On that side I see a plastic tube running down from somewhere above and behind me, feeding clear liquid into my arm: I can feel the needle tug when I flex that muscle. Simultaneously I become aware of another tube crossing warm over my thigh, draining my bladder in a slow steady stream.

I'm certain for a moment that with all they have done--and not knowing how long it has been since I fell--they surely must have found what was under my nail. I can't tell to my own satisfaction if it's still there, for fear of pressing too hard. Fear floods me. And eventually ebbs. I failed. It isn't over, but I have no more say in what happens.

The room is small and white and has a flat white smell to it. The walls, a few paces distant, are lined with cupboards. White. I wonder (don't) what's in them (oh, don't). The whine in my ears has subsided now, or else I have grown too used to it to hear it anymore. The sound of my breath and the creaks and rattles when I move are absorbed all around without echo. I squirm a bit. Shiver. Wrinkle the sheet. Don't think.

  
I have lived all my life in the village--know this road like the back of my hand. I have lived all my life with the light of the Compound always shining just beyond the horizon. As much a part of the world as anything else. Walk through the village, and tell me if you can, after three generations: of all the things you see, pumps and guns and soap, what did we, the People, invent (or manage to sustain through the long dark that followed the Fall, if that is truly your belief), and what did we steal--conceptually at the very least--from the Compound? What did we earn, with our righteousness, and what was bounty from the heavens?

You can't tell. And I don't care. One generation fought (not very hard, it's said bitterly, frequently, these days, with them being mostly safely in their graves), but two since have coexisted--all bloodshed on a strictly individual basis--trading labour for knowledge, for innovation. But now--

Now the din of the machines drowns out my breathing and any trace of footfall, and in the light they cast I have a dozen shadows. And I ought not think.

  
Footfalls. The grey metal door beyond the foot of the bed swings open. I nearly scream. In this light there are no shadows. It's one of those women the new soldiers brought with them when they came. I have never been close enough to one until now to see how strange they really are, even by the standards of the Compound.

She wears the uniform it seems they all do, the new soldiers, a flexible black beetle shell, tough and tight and frightening. And looks as though she's being slowly poisoned. As though she's been drained and refilled with poison. They feed on the blood of bad slaves, it is said, and those slaves in their turn, if they're women, become--tales told after a vanishing, easy enough to dismiss until the moment when one of them is leaning over you, the faint scent of her disturbingly reminiscent of metal, of exhaust, and her face as rigidly vacant as that of a corpse. Involuntarily my left arm twitches, hard enough to sting where the needle is.

She presses something cold against the place in my neck where the pulse is, and her dead eyes fix mine for a few heartbeats.

She flips off the sheet--and the restraints, I observe, are of the same tough ubiquitous black stuff as their uniforms are--cursorily examines both my hands, both my feet; then smoothly slides the needle from my arm, and then the catheter from my urethra, and I wince at the pinch and try to choke back the thought that comes like a taunt that that's not the worst, you can't even begin to imagine the worst that will happen.

Then she puts the sheet back, smooth, tight, and leaves me.

  
The new soldiers arrived last harvest, or less than half a Year ago as they measure time--being exposed to both systems of measurement all my life I can convert without conscious effort. They came as the inevitable next step in a steadily escalating confrontation, the entirely predictable response to Our latest endeavour, which had been the sabotage of one of the newest machines, with bloody and expensive results. Fourteen dead and when I heard the names it took a moment's thought, longer than it takes me to translate cycles into Years, to tally how many of these were Us and how many were Them.

Though the Glorious Revolution rightly maintains than anyone labouring on one of their machines, unless with immediate intent to sabotage, is by definition Them. Even those labouring at gunpoint, as many were by then, even before the new soldiers arrived. In their insect shells and insect masks, and their dull, distant insect mind, unfamiliar and contemptuous.

I've come to kill the queen. Smile. Don't think.  
  
  
The room is warmer, I think. Don't think. The grey door opens again. Don't think. Another uniform. No mistaking the face, though that was the first time I saw it.

It's the one they told me God said to kill. I didn't believe them in the slightest and I didn't believe in their Cause; nevertheless I did in obedience plunge the syringe through the hard black material of his sleeve into the harder flesh of his arm, up to the hilt, and squeezed, and pulled it out again, and waited with the needle poised, next to my neck, for him to fall, realizing amazed that this thing had been done. But he just looked at me. He didn't even seem surprised.

Then there was a sting like hot fat on the side of my neck that I thought I must have given myself, and I thought it was over. Over, forever, for me.

My fear seems smaller than it ought to be as he approaches, hard face as blank as the woman's was and nearly as pale. He comes and stands close to the bed, to my right; he leans over me, a black masculine silhouette in the blaze of the white rectangular light in the ceiling--an eclipse, a portent (my mind babbles, soothing nonsense).

"I'm sure you were manipulated," he says quietly. I keep my pinprick pupils fixed on the fixture far above him, until he grabs my jaw in his right hand and twists my head to the side away from the light toward the other hand, the black hand, holding the syringe centimeters from my eye, far enough to recognize it. Then closer. "I'm confident you were _compelled_ to behave as you did," he continues, through clenched teeth it sounds like but his voice is still dead calm. "I hope you'll forgive me taking it personally." He brings the tip of the needle so close that my eyelashes brush against it when I blink, blink; fingers and thumb vise-tight on either side of my jawbone as if I would dare to try and move away. The fear is there, yes, now, a jet-scream static. What did it look like, I have the mad impulse to ask him, over the din of my heart--what was the last thing your left eye saw?

I haven't said a word. Not since I set out along the road. In retrospect, should not my cowardly historical needle-thrust have been accompanied at least by a cry of Long Live the Glorious Revolution, or Power to the People?

The Glorious Revolution.

Who bade me dress my best for death and had me rehearse the kill, the kills. Then promised him something irresistible if he would agree to meet someone privately, and the someone the Revolution chose was me. No more ignoble death than alone with another man's wife, according to the mores of the People--well understood in the Compound, and honoured at least enough to keep the peace for two generations. However little the wife is worth, it's still considered wrong.

Fuck the People.

  
"Who told you to kill me?" he asks. I'm staring down the barrel of the hypodermic needle I recognized instantly, selected for the certainty it would pierce, without breaking, that thick hide they all wear.

"I acted of my own accord," I say, as I know I'm supposed to, even though I was never, ever, supposed to be in this situation.

He's unconvinced. Unsurprisingly. Hard fingers jerk my face back up toward his. Closer than the woman got. A different smell. Beneath an arched brow his wide eye burns bright with some fervour equal to any I've seen in those who sent me here. And I feel the needle press against the muscle of my neck. The right side where I held it not quite touching and waited too long to see him fall.

"Interesting substance," he says. "Locally produced?"

It can't matter. They must have worse. Although, if there's one thing the People know, it's poison.

"Yes," I say. And the needle breaks my skin. A small searing pain--I await death, and all the time it doesn't come he regards me with dull smugness. Straight strong jaw set tight.

At length, satisfied in some way, he lets go of my face, relieving an ache I'd forgotten I had. He turns his back to me and puts the needle on the counter. My eyes follow it. A drop of red on the tip. Sufficient, they assured me--the backup was only for if it stuck or broke or some other unforeseeable event.

My hands clench beyond my control into fists, tendons pressing against the straps.

"Different needle," he says. Then spins on his heel to face me again, a superior smile flashing and gone. "We don't carve them one by one, you know. Each one is not unique."

I try to understand. I'm breathing too fast. Black spots silver-edged crawl across the white wall, the blank ceiling. I'm shivering. He watches me a minute or two, then glances at the door and on cue his woman enters, a synchronous nightmare, I'm dreaming. Opens a cupboard and flips back the sheet and I feel another needle prick, in my left arm near where the tube went in before.

The panic's gone before the injection is over. She watches my face, while administering the drug, and for some seconds afterward, then departs.

  
Keep the fear down. Swallow it hard. Here, where the two high hills used to be, turn right, and follow the access road in beyond the fence. I know soon there will have to be a guard--no face, only a gun--well before I reach anything of any importance. But now there is a place where two or three shadows coincide and manage to make something close to darkness. And close against the corrugated metal wall which bounds this dark my mind reconciles minimal visual input into a human being. Half a face and one pale hand floating in the gloom.

  
Half a face and one pale hand. Here, they're the parts that stand out least. Black is the definite colour, against the white on white. Leaning on the white counter to my right, staring at the opposite wall.

  
"Nobody knows what you tried to do," he says at length, in a reasonable voice. He glances at the door again. "That's the one that tranquilized you, and it won't tell."

I nod. _It_. Reasonable.

"Nobody questioned me bringing you here," he continues, after I have shown no more reaction. "You're a local. I could have stuffed you down the incinerator. Nobody cares. Nobody _sees_."

No. Nobody smart, nobody sane, sees. His gaze shifts again. Door. Wall. Me. But I don't care either. Things are too far beyond my control to concern me. This is only a story. A short story, nearly over.

"Answer my questions correctly and you're free," he concludes. Calm and clenched. Oh, yes, free to go back, a failure at this now as well. I have a strong impulse at the thought to tell him what he wants to know.

He looks away from me and down and toys with his pretty ring, a token of command I assume. He was doing the same, but looking at me, when he stepped out, then, away from the other shadows. Obviously I must come close or no word can be heard above the din. Obviously I must come within arm's length; eyes lower than his shoulder, this close. The neck and the face are too high, too chancy, I decide now, never actually having seen him before, and I don't think any of Us has, except at anonymous distance, or they would have said...

I am only allowed to assess for the second or two it will take him to conclude something's wrong and respond drastically, as he ought to, if he's really got this far on competence. You'd have to be desperate to be here...

"Well?" he asks.

I glance furtively to my left, and with my right hand I jam the needle in.

Answer my questions and you're free. He'd have to be even more desperate than I'd thought before, to still think there might be something to be gained from this. He lived, that's a prize, is it not?

"You asked me one question," I say. The poison. He lived. "I answered."

At this response he seems momentarily at a loss.

I think to keep from thinking: I know for a fact that they have people here whose only job is making anyone they want answer any question they ask. They're as orderly as bees in the Compound, and the new soldiers even more so. No doubt their leader is moderately versed in all their most essential arts; still he doesn't seem as assured in the role as a professional would be.

He recovers his composure.

"I asked you _two_ questions," he snaps. "I asked you who told you to kill me, and I asked you why."

Hesitation. The Glorious Revolution must be a lot more competent than I've previously given them credit for. Must stand more of a chance of victory, of one kind or another, than I'd ever imagined. Hesitation.

"I acted of my own accord," I say.

He straightens and walks back over to me--a fluid electrical movement, swift and precise with shining black anger--and slaps my face. Hard. The room swallows the sound. It's a sensation I am well enough accustomed to. His jaw clenches, the muscle in the side of his cheek flexing rhythmically. His hand, poised above me, makes a fist. Then he turns his back to me once again.

He _is_ desperate. Not to hit me again, when he obviously wants to. Not to hit me harder, when he obviously can.

  
Indeed, they were completely confident he'd come alone, for the right sort of bait. This one, though unquestionably the leader of the new soldiers, and therefore the Compound--and so too the village--was in a position, it had been observed, akin to the idiot eldest son or barren wife in a powerful family. They said this in front of me. To me. Heeded, obeyed, his status respected, but all the while despised by his subordinates with an intensity that rivals the hatred that the People feel for them. That all of the People feel toward all of the residents of the Compound. So they said.

So, they said, he would walk alone out into obvious danger, on the off chance he actually would get the information promised. The power to put the People in their place once more, for good, and initiate a new order as untroubled as the old, but vastly more productive; to claim the success entirely his own, and leave admired once again for his military skill, rather than the symbolic strength in his ring.

Ah. He could never give me to them. They'd know he crept off alone, unofficial: he'd lose even more face. I'm dead when he's done with me. A relief in a way to know for certain.

Alone. Well--the Glorious Revolution, for all their insight, went very wrong in being unable to imagine that even in their boots the soldiers' women could be as quiet as our own. As invisible.

  
I hear a _click_ , and twitch violently. But he still has his back to me. Back broad beneath broader shoulders and above a wide belt now I observe with weird dissociated interest being removed revealing the seam where tight top meets tighter trousers and my God how can you think such things now?

Why not? I snarl at the voice of guilt, feeling absolutely justified in doing so for maybe the first time in my life. Honestly, why not? I am going to die soon, and I stopped believing in Hell when I noticed that nobody else did; and I think everyone in the village, maybe everyone in the World, stopped believing in God the day Heaven proved itself so completely mundane, three generations ago, when the conquerors came. Hell is a word, in the village, no more. No _less_ \--no more.

I am going to die soon.

With a sound like paper tearing he undoes his top, pulling at the left shoulder and shrugging his right arm out of its formfitting sleeve. The sharp smell of the sweat trapped under it quickly dissipates. His bare right arm is lean-muscled and even paler than his face. A grey undergarment covers his back and shoulders, I see as the shell comes away, the other sleeve shucked, and he tosses the top on the cupboard violently - smack - and spins round.

Again he seems taken aback by my response.

It _is_ a shock. And I suppose in a world used to such wonders it might be seen solely as an imperfection--and I, a primitive, ought to be all the more horrified. But I'm not. It is beautiful. His left arm, exposed. All brilliant metal sinew and wax-translucent plastic, which moves like muscle, shot through with hair-fine wires. Paler, harder, smoother than the right, but otherwise its mirror image. The most marvelous machine I have ever seen. Oh, God, I feel that flutter in my gut that my husband on occasion would engender, before my own shortcoming became undeniable to him, and attempted insemination thereafter became, in his eyes, an offensively futile exercise. With me, at least.

He registers surprise, and then disgust. That I am not disgusted, let alone afraid. He erred. Fear has, in fact, decreased inversely as to fascination.

My eyes move, after several long tense seconds, back to the eternally enrapturing light above me.

"I guess that explains why you're not dead," I say evenly. Wondering why I do.

Silence. He yanks the sheet down. He pinches a nipple with the rough hard fingers of his warm right hand hard enough to make me want to make a sound, but I fight it. He keeps squeezing until I look at him.

"That," he hisses, "explains why _you're_ not dead. Right?"

I shrug my shoulders, an awkward gesture in my position. It's possible that I misinterpreted his behaviour totally. Maybe he made up a poor excuse about needing something that, logically, I am very unlikely to have: a lie to tell himself, when all he really wanted was petty revenge, an outlet for his frustration (seething huge)--rape, the worst humiliation, so it is said. Before he shoves me down the incinerator, my secrets unimportant; my threat, the People's threat, beneath contempt. A worse humiliation, that, I'd think. But I don't know. Yet.

He circles the bed, pulling the undergarment up over his head as he goes, putting his cobweb-careful hair all in disarray and revealing a torso as coarse fine and corpse-pale as the rest--and revealing the seam in his shoulder and side where synthetic flesh meets skin, a lacy fringe of scar tissue, testimony to violence survived. Apparently the work of an enemy armed with the same type of weapon they favour: I've seen a few examples up close since the new soldiers came. None alive, mind you, that were half as bad as this must have been.

I wonder pointlessly how he was positioned, where the shot or shots came from. What flesh was burnt off but has since grown back, and what survived but was later cut away for the sake of the prosthetic?

He's on my left now, and at my side again. Lean thighs and tight black crotch curve white stomach and chest run up the centre with a fine line of dark hair stuck down with sweat; the long cauterized line... The sheet is down around my waist now and bruises throb to the doubletime beat of my heart. Irrationally I curse the one who tried to kill him last, who is undoubtedly long dead, for doing this to me.

Perhaps (don't move your fingers, now, don't give yourself away) I can use my backup poison on him. All that skin exposed and he will be close. My own death must be more painful. A noble sacrifice. Left-handed he's sliding the sheet slowly down, running ridge-tipped plastic fingertips, broad and blunt like those on the right, along the inside of my left arm, over the little puncture wounds, and the restraint wet with sweat at the edges, and damp palm, and fingers. Don't panic, don't flinch.

He leans threat-close to my face once more and his lip curls slightly, interpreting my anxiety I suppose as a more suitable response to his actions than those I'd previously shown. Hand moving (as his blue eye tries to outstare mine but I focus on the black blank opposite) up onto my belly and down between my legs the expression abruptly becomes that opaque stare once more as he shoves two mechanical fingers hard and sudden deep into me. My knees try to come together in belated response to the cold (though not wholly unexpected) intrusion, but they can't.

It doesn't hurt. I've done as much on guilty nights when my husband was--anywhere, anywhere rather than with me. In that it is humiliating. But not intolerably. I strive to keep my face as impassive as his is, as his slippery fingers warmer now slide in and out, friction tugging flesh; to glare straight back, bored, at his ghost of a superior smirk, acknowledging he is fully aware of my treacherous slickness. I picture under the black curve beside my side a prosthetic phallus of chrome and silken milky plastic; I see it siring mechanical sons on me, validating and justifying me. I see silver. I see fire. How did the poison interact with this extraordinary tissue? I imagine it still in there, encapsulated, toxic: flex the right muscle, move the right way, and it might ooze out again and run down the slick surface of his arm unabsorbed and the back of his hand glistening and onto these digits slowly pushing now into the perpetually open wound that is my inadequate sex. I shudder sick trying to pry my mind away from the spectacle.

At length he grimaces, withdraws his hand; he looks half disconcerted again. Steps back as far as he can to lean on the counter, arm and arm folded across his chest.

"Who told you to kill me, and why?" he chants, a prerecorded monotone recital. Still pretending interest in that. Or regaining interest. I shiver.

"And when I've told you what you want to know you'll let me go, free, no harm done," I say flatly, sarcastically.

He shrugs, a minimal movement of the shoulders. "Why not?"  
  
  
"Because I tried to kill you," I answer.

  
He shrugs again. "You didn't succeed," he says. Peers down at his folded arms, or at his shiny black boots on the shiny white floor.

Indeed. Nor would I have left our rendezvous alive if I had kept my word, not if _he'd_ succeeded. It makes guilt difficult. Cheer for the maggot or the rotting meat as you will. An assassin's a more admirable thing to be than a traitor.

"Very soldierly..." I say. Very unlikely, I think. He might well have honour, but never at the cost of duty. Black eye, white hand, I look at them: "I'm sure whoever gave you _that_ is glad of your forgiving nature."

"Oh, he is," he says calmly, still staring at the far wall. "Ask anyone. He is."

He straightens up and paces the small distance from the edge of the cupboard to the edge of the bed casually, but with that hate like lightning animating him. I grit my teeth preparing for the blow and wonder dully, distantly, what compels me to be suicidally cruel.

"I'm not lying," he says. Bends close and I stare at the absence of an eye and the faint scars visible around it. "He's alive. He's well. He's a model citizen. Ask _anyone_." He forces three synthetic fingers in as he speaks and twists them roughly: uncomfortable, but hardly one of the responses I was prepared for.

"And _he_ certainly did a better job than _you_ did. And _he_ wasn't following _orders_." Three long broad fingers pump in and out of me, viciously, vindictively, and his left eye sees more than his right does at the moment I suspect. Even though it doesn't matter I don't want to respond the way I do, hips moving, feeling his breath hit my cold skin, feeling his right hand make a fist in my hair.

He pulls my head up sharply to be too close to his and I watch the hard metal sinews of his other arm writhe a moment, before he stops the bruising twisting movement, just pushing in, jaw tight, and I wonder if there is sensation, if he can feel the pressure, the rhythmic response inside my body. Or if its obedience to his commands is as unilateral and dumb, as numb, as that of any other machine. Any other weapon.

"But I'd better not let you go, you're a _real_ threat." He lets my head fall back, then begins to move again. In the space of three short sharp breaths I climax. Envisioning for some horrible inexplicable reason my husband cut down by their guns, along with the rest of his Glorious Revolution. And all of the other men of the village, and all of their women, and all of their women's children, all falling down dead, because of something I had said.

He keeps moving. Eye fixed sidewise on my face, waiting.

Maybe he would. Maybe he would let me go. No-one would comment; no-one would dare to care. There are two roads out of the Compound. I could take the other. It has to end eventually, but it need not be right now, it need not be here.

He slows. Stops. Withdraws. Keeps staring, like a corpse or a battered unpleasantly lifelike doll.

Everyone I ever knew, all of my family. My father, who said I was cursed and a curse, because my husband had said so, and he was my father's superior. My mother, who said naught to contradict them. Dead for a promise I know beyond doubt is a lie.

The first tear I've shed since I set of my own free will out onto the road overflows the red rim of my eye and trickles down into my ear, slow and cool.

For the certainty I won't live to see it.

  
I tell him what he wants to hear.

  
He signals again somehow and his woman enters. She--it--unfastens the restraints one by one, while he puts on his clothes. Undergarment, glove, top, belt, and finally the ring, which fits on with a _click_. He has left by the time I sit up, unrushed, stretching my wrists and ankles and shifting away from the clamminess under me. Swing my legs over the right side. Behind me she opens one of the cupboards, click, and takes out the clothes I was wearing when I fell. Or some very like them. She puts them on the bed next to me.

"Thank you," I say, in my native tongue. I can't think of the word in theirs. I can't tell if she understands. She says nothing, stands staring at nothing. Not even the wall.

I stand unsteadily, breathe deep, and slowly dress. Even the veil, as if I'm sure I'll be going out in public very soon.

Then I sit back down on the edge of the bed and kick my feet and absently pick at a scab on my shin until the blood beads bright red and runs. Keeping an eye on her face as I do, looking for proof that what they say is true. But she does not seem any more interested in the blood than she is in anything else.

I envy her.

  
Then with the nail of my left little finger I dig casually into the wound I've opened, and then with the tip of the thumbnail of the same hand I break the bead of poison that has remained safely cemented there. And the last thing I see is the white, white, white, rectangular light above.

***

 


End file.
